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soundmind
Participating Frequently
May 23, 2020
Question

Strange 'blip' sound ruining my dialogue!

  • May 23, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 1846 views

Hi all, 


I've been getting this weird intermittent blip/pop sound on dialogue audio and I have no idea why, its driving me crazy. I have included 2 examples below (example 1: blip @ "memoir", example 2: blip @ "affiliate"). This sound is not on the original audio files. All I've done is import the audio into Audition and cut it up a bit (the blips are not occuring where I've made edits). The blip/pop sounds seem to change location almost as if it is a sample rate issue or something. I've tried disabling all effects & the blips are still there. I've tinkered with different audio drivers, sample rates, re-installed/updated Audition, cleared space on the computer and closed other programs to free up ram. 

 

One weird thing I've noticed is that the blip/pop sounds seem to not occur when I'm playing back the audio in the waveform editor but when I immediately switch to the multitrack editor and play from the same position the blips are there, even if there are no effects or processes applied to the multitrack. 


What the hell is going on here?

Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
Community Expert
May 23, 2020

Need more information. For a start, what format were these files in originally when you got them? Apart from cutting them up, have you done any other processing to them at all before putting them in Multitrack? Also, whilst I can hear a very slight blip in 'affiliate' I can't detect one in 'memoir', although the waveform for several of the words looks a little strange. And that's the other thing - there's no way it is going to be possible to discover anything that subtle from an MP3 file - whatever you present has to be in the original format that's causing the issue - so if it's causing this effect in Audition, it has to be a wav file, because that's what it's running as in - the native format.

 

In view of the fact that I can't detect one blip, and can only just detect the other, I'm also wondering about how you are playing these files. You haven't indicated whether this is a Mac or a PC you are playing them on, but if it's a PC and you're using a Windows-driven sound device then it's quite possible that the output is being resampled. When Microsoft does resampling, it's not good, and all quality bets are off...

    S
    soundmindAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    May 24, 2020

    Thanks so much for the reply! Appreciate your thoughtful response.

     

    Would Microsoft's crummy driver create the sort of issue I'm experiencing? 

     

    Bit rate 1536kbps WAVE files. I did apply EQ, compression and a hard limiter in the Multitrack but I disabled those before I bounced the examples above. So they were literally just imported into the multitrack and the issue appeared upon playback, but its not as prominent, sometimes not even present all, upon playback in the waveform editor. Playing the tracks on a PC, 8GB of ram, Intel core i7 (fine for much bigger projects than a couple of wave files). Using the windows MME driver. Tried the ASIO driver too and that didn't make a difference (I don't really know what the optimal settings are for the ASIO driver are...).

     

    I bounced a couple more obvious examples, in the original format, in the attached files here. Example 3, blip on "disaster", example 4, blip on "continental" and audio weirdness on "eighty".

     

    Examples 3 & 4...

    https://drive.google.com/open?id=18c1ZGqnP8zUmV6u5m3kDzTZJNIMtXcs7 

     

    Any further insight would be greatly appreciated 🙂

    SteveG_AudioMasters_
    Community Expert
    SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
    Community Expert
    May 24, 2020

    Need to see the original file, as well, to make a comparison. I can clearly see the blip on 'disaster' and it looks as though there's some sort of frequency-based error at the blip point (I've put a ring around it on one channel):

    I can honestly say that I've never seen Audition do anything like that before, and although I suppose there's a first time for everything... that said, there are other disturbing things about your recordings that may well be significant, one of them being the rather grating distortion that I can actually show you pictures of. The first one is the waveform from a single word from one of your files, and the second is a picture of what a similar length word from a completely different file looks like when it's not distorted (I've ringed one bit of the distortion in your file so you can see what I'm looking at, but it's present everywhere):

    And this is why I'd like to see the original untouched files.

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